Upper Nyack 5th graders, parents, protest state testing

Chanting “I’m more than a test score” and waving picket signs, a group of about 19 students and 10 parents from Upper Nyack Elementary marched through the village this morning to protest standardized exams being held at their school and across New York state this week.

The trial exams, known as field tests, are given to students to help companies like Pearson improve the quality of testing and educational materials it sells to the state.

Betsy Chollet, a mother of a third-grader and a fifth-grader at Upper Nyack Elementary, said she and other parents organized the protest after becoming fed up with seeing their children constantly stressed about the increasing number of standardized tests they’re faced with.

Unlike the bevy of other standardized tests students take annually, the field tests aren’t counted toward students’ grades and mainly benefit companies that are producing the testing material, she said.

“Parents are tired of seeing their kid stressed out,” she said. “This is particularly infuriating because the field test does not benefit kids in any way.”

Upper Nyack fifth-graders were given math tests Thursday while other classes throughout the district were tested in different subjects like English Language Arts.

About 50 students out of 70 who are in the fifth-grade class didn’t join the protest but walked into school with notes from their parents exempting them from the field test, Chollet said.

The group of ralliers met at Memorial Park in Nyack at 8:45 a.m. and walked through the village, stopping at Village Hall before heading back to class at 10 a.m. Along the way they were met with supportive cheers and honks from passersby, Chollet said.

“People realize that their very high taxes are being spent irresponsibly,” she said, referring to the cost for substitute teachers the district takes on when full-time teachers leave the classroom to grade the tests.

She added that the state’s new teacher evaluation system, which relies in part on student test scores to grade teachers’ efficiency, is a method that hurts students and takes time away from learning. The new evaluation system is aligned with the state’s new Common Core learning standards that went into effect this year.

“We expect high-quality teachers and we demand high-quality teachers, so yes we want them to be evaluated, but we don’t want them evaluated based on a brand new curriculum that’s been forced on us by the state,” Chollet said.

MAREESA NICOSIA has been writing about education since 2008, starting at The Saratogian newspaper in Saratoga Springs. She joined The Journal News/Lohud.com in September 2011 and immediately turned her focus to the turbulent East Ramapo school district as a major part of her municipal beat covering the town of Ramapo in Rockland County. As a municipal reporter, she covered government, politics, crime, courts and business in addition to education. In September 2013, she became a member of the paper's Education Team, and began covering education trends in Rockland, Westchester and Putnam counties and more than a dozen school districts. Her investigative reporting has earned numerous awards, including from the Associated Press Media Editors (APME) for a staff East Ramapo project (2012) and from the New York State Associated Press Association (NYSAPA) for a solo project about homelessness in Saratoga Springs (2009). Mareesa holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the State University of New York College at Brockport and studied journalism at the University of Westminister in London. She lives in Riverdale, in the Bronx. Follow her on Twitter: @MareesaNicosia.

1 Comment

usually right

Who sponsored this stupid protest. We are protesting the wrong thing. The entire school district did poorly. We complain that it’s “too much testing”, we have “diversity”, and our teachers don’t know what they should be teaching. It’s not too much testing, has nothing to do with diversity. The problem is we are happy having the teachers teaching at level. When you complain – they say the administration makes us do it. BS. The schools districts that did well have the same amount of testing, special needs students and also had teachers with who didn’t know what was contained in the test. Guess what? In the best schools districts 8th grade they had 25% of the students testing above grade level to Nyack’s 4%. That’s what we should be protesting. BTW – it has nothing to do with money. The majority of Nyack elementary school tenured teachers make over $100,000 – more than than the household income of Upper Nyack. Don’t believe me – check the census data. It’s all public information.